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Targeting the Tiniest

A major school of thought in environmentalist thinking is that small is beautiful. Can that apply as well to killing billions of insects with chemicals?

Matt Staver for The New York TimesA tiny grasshopper in Lusk, Wyo.

The idea is getting a test in eastern Wyoming, where an area the size of New Jersey is infested with what agriculture experts believe could easily be a trillion or more voracious young grasshoppers, led by an old denizen of the Great Plains, Melanoplus sanguinipes, the migratory grasshopper. Melanoplus made its dark reputation in the 1930s Dust Bowl, where grasshopper swarms devastated an already burnt-over landscape. But as I report in Thursday’s paper from the town of Lusk, the fight against Melanoplus and its cohort of 12 or so other eating-machine grasshopper species, which farmers call “the dirty dozen,” is also different this time.

The pesticide being used, called Dimilin, is sprayed in small quantities and is not immediately toxic, but instead affects the shells or exoskeletons of the bugs as they molt. In the last big grasshopper outbreak, by contrast, in the mid-1980s, the federal government sprayed the broad-spectrum insecticide Malathion, which has been linked to human health issues.

Dimilin is also sprayed from tiny, efficient one-seater airplanes that pilots say are like gas-sipping Priuses compared with everything in crop dusting that came before. The Malathion attacks in the last big bug go-around were led by four-engine tankers left over from the Korean War.

One thing that doesn’t change though: Insects ultimately die, and whether they keel over immediately or later, the process – whether one thinks of it as cruel or simply the way of the world – is not pretty.

“They eat it, digest it, and it affects their molt,” said Gail Mahnke, supervisor of Niobrara County Weed and Pest Control District in Lusk. “They either die during the molt or come out missing a leg or something, then die.”

And they die young. The spraying program is specifically aimed at baby grasshoppers.

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